Taipei, 24 September 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Anthony Gill
Europe’s three largest economies — France, Germany and the UK — rank among the seven countries globally most exposed to potential economic coercion by Beijing, according to new modelling from National Taiwan University, despite years of European efforts to reduce reliance on China. The index, built from computer simulations weighing trade, investment, military and diplomatic ties across 184 countries, directly contradicts a widely held assumption: that China’s deepest leverage sits over poorer nations in Asia, Africa and South America where Chinese firms have invested heavily in extractive industries and manufacturing.
A Finding That Overturns the Conventional Wisdom
George Yin, senior research fellow at NTU’s Center for China Studies, put the result plainly: “These findings contradict the expectation that exposure to Chinese power would be significantly less in Europe than in the Indo-Pacific, given Europe’s geographical insulation from Chinese military reach.” Researchers also found democracies were generally more vulnerable to Chinese influence than autocracies — a genuinely uncomfortable finding for governments that have spent the past several years publicly framing “de-risking” from China as a strategic priority. The index, jointly published with Berlin-based think tanks GPPi and Merics, tracks relative Chinese power since 2013 — the year Xi Jinping took office and ushered in a more assertive Chinese diplomatic posture — using proxies that range from foreign direct investment and trade to soft-power instruments like Confucius Institutes and panda loans.
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SubscribeWhy “De-Risking” Hasn’t Actually Worked
The index’s most pointed conclusion is that Europe’s post-2019 effort to treat China as a strategic rival rather than simply a trading partner has produced only “modest” results. Some countries have genuinely reduced exposure — the UK, Norway, Switzerland and Sweden among them, with Stockholm going as far as shutting every Confucius Institute on its soil in 2020 after a diplomatic row with Beijing. Others have moved sharply in the opposite direction. Spain, now ranked the fifth-most-exposed economy in Europe, has seen Chinese imports almost double since 2013. Ireland’s exposure has surged even faster: the stock of Chinese investment in its pharmaceutical and tech sectors reached nearly $20bn by 2025, a scale of dependency that barely existed a decade earlier. The pattern lines up closely with what EBM has tracked in the EU’s own trade data — a €98bn quarterly goods deficit with China that keeps widening even as Brussels escalates its rhetoric, because tariffs address price, not the underlying dependency the index is actually measuring.
The Leverage China Has Already Demonstrated It Will Use
This isn’t an abstract modelling exercise. China showed exactly what this leverage looks like in practice in 2025, when export restrictions on key components — magnets among them — brought several US and EU car plants close to a standstill, a retaliatory response to President Trump briefly raising tariffs on Chinese exports to 145%. EBM has covered how that same rare-earth chokepoint now constrains Europe’s ability to push back on trade at all, given China’s roughly 90% share of global rare-earth processing capacity — the exact kind of structural dependency the NTU index is designed to surface systematically rather than case by case. Russia, notably, ranks as the single most exposed country in Europe, driven by exports to China rising from 1.6% of GDP in 2013 to a peak of 5.4% in 2023 — a reminder that sanctions-driven trade reorientation can create the same exposure profile as deliberate economic integration.
What Western Governments Are Being Told to Do About It
GPPi director Thorsten Benner drew the index’s conclusion into a direct policy message: “Learn to use your own leverage vis-à-vis Beijing and be willing to pay a price for this as you defend your interests — otherwise the outcome will be submission to a Sino-centric economic order.” That price is not small. EY-Parthenon has separately estimated the EU, US and UK would need to invest a combined $23.6tn by 2050 to end reliance on China across manufacturing and technology — a figure that makes clear why, even with every government insisting de-risking is underway, the EU’s own €1bn-a-day trade deficit with China — a gap von der Leyen has called “unsustainable” — keeps widening rather than closing.
My Read: What makes this index genuinely useful isn’t that it confirms Europe depends on China — everyone already knew that in outline. It’s that it replaces a vague sense of dependency with a systematic ranking that treats France, Germany and the UK as more strategically exposed than most of the developing economies conventional wisdom assumed were China’s real captive markets. That reframing matters for how European governments should actually be allocating scarce de-risking capital: not toward the countries assumed to be most vulnerable, but toward the largest economies discovering, a decade into China’s more assertive diplomacy, that geographic distance from Beijing was never the protection it looked like.
